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 Tomorrow night (UPDATE: postponed to Sunday, October 16 due to weather), urban historian Gordon Linzer is hosting a pre-Halloween walking tour of Haunted New York.
Although New York’s most famous paranormal sites are outside the city proper (the “Amityville Horror” house for example and the UFO sightings around the Wanaque reservoir), the boroughs are no slouch in the ghost department. And we’re talking celebrity ghosts.
Rumor has it that Mark Twain’s ghost can be seen to this day—and haunts a stairwell. 14 West 10th Street (near Fifth Avenue) has been host to numerous sightings of a Twain-like ghost in the house’s stairway. The site has also had more recent real-life notoriety due to its involvement in the Joel Steinberg case.
The Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem Heights is said to be haunted by the ghost of Aaron Burr’s mistress, Eliza Jumel. Numerous guests to the mansion have seen a ghost in a purple dress that tapped on walls and windows throughout the building. Greenwich Village restaurant One If By Land, Two If By Sea is built on the site of Burr’s carriage house and is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Burr and his daughter Theodosia.
St. Marks-in-the-Bowery Church in the East Village is the burial place of Peter Stuyvesant, whose ghost is rumored to roam around the chapel with a spectral pegleg.
In midtown, the New Amsterdam Theatre is said to be haunted by the ghost of a Ziegfield Follies chorus girl and the Algonquin Hotel has been the site of numerous ghost sightings.
For more, check out About.com’s guide to Ghosts in New York City, Weird New Jersey magazine and the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index.
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